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Testing Paint Colors in Natural Light

< 1 min readI recently realized that I’ve been living among wall colors I DON’T LOVE for way too many months and that it is time to make some of my planned color changes now while I can appreciate them rather than at the end of the project when I’m just about to pass it off to someone else.

After grabbing a really unreasonable number of swatches at the paint store, I set them up next to the wood trim – which I don’t intend to change – and was really surprised how most of the ones that seemed perfectly plausible in the light of the paint store were way to harshly blue grey in the house.  The outlier I had almost rejected as terribly taupe was the winner. 

I had some fun this week painting swatches on different patches of wall and seeing how they looked in the differing light conditions.

Are you ready for the weird part?  In the two bedrooms with south facing windows that grey paint went right back to taupe.  Its nearly brown next to my grey sheets (I do have a favorite color).  The color of natural and artificial light and the projected color of the other elements in the room – floor, ceiling, furnishings, objects outside the room – can have a strong effect on the way the colors look in the real space.

This is why I paint swatches!

I’ll need a bluer grey paint for that bedroom.  And since the trim is already painted white, I think I can go a little darker and make the white trim pop more.  Here are two more colors thrown in the mix.   I think I’ll likely end up with the medium grey.

tricolor

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